What Is Electronic Voting Machine Source Code?

Ellen Theisen, MA, CEO of The Vote-PAD Company, in her 2005 report "Myth Breakers: Facts About Electronic Elections," included the following description:

"Source code is the list of instructions that cause the computer to display screens, record votes, tally votes, and perform all other functions both visible and invisible. For example, when the voter presses the VOTE button, that action triggers a list of instructions for the machine to follow internally.

'Open' source code means the instructions would not be secret. Anyone would be able to look at them."

The National Academy of Science's 2005 report "Asking the Right Questions About Electronic Voting," stated:

"The source code of the [electronic voting] system is the software that defines its behavior under all possible circumstances... [It is] a computer program rendered in human-readable form that also clearly lays out the structure of the program."

Bev Harris, proprietor of the website www.blackboxvoting.org, wrote an article titled "Inside a U.S. Election Vote Counting Program" Scoop Independent News, July 8, 2003, which included the following description of "source code":

"[Source code] is all the computer programs that tell electronic voting machines how to record and tally votes..."